The Dry Salvages: I do not know much about gods…

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.

T. S. Eliot (from The Dry Salvages)

Not so unwonted

It seems unwonted is not so unwonted. Esta madrugada me llegaban los ecos de wont. En alguna parte había visto, recientemente, esa palabra de la cual sin duda deriva unwonted. Un poco de paciencia fue suficiente inversión para obtener la respuesta. En el segundo párrafo de The Cask of Amontillado, Poe escribe:


It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will. I continued as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.

Recordé que en una lectura de ese cuento acudí al diccionario por causa de wont: adj. accustomed; used (usually followed by an infinitive): He was wont to rise at dawn. Claramente, el significado de unwonted se desprende de esta definición.

Lottery on June 27th

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 2th. but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

Así inicia uno de los mejores cuentos que he leído, el clásico de Shirley Jackson: The Lottery. Además del virtuosismo para invocar y transmitir el horror del azar, encuentro fascinante en este relato la insospechada y magistral revelación del barniz de cotidianidad, de rutina y acaso de felicidad que recubre una realidad abominable y fatal.

Vasilisa the Beautiful

Vasilisa (Ilustración de Iván Bilibin).

Hoy leí Vasilisa the Beautiful, un cuento popular ruso. Excelente, me gustó. Puede leerse aquí y una versión ligeramente distinta y más simple aquí. El camino hasta el cuento partió del encuentro casual con una ilustración de la bruja llamada Baba Yaga. Posteriormente, tratando de informarme más sobre esta bruja que desconocía llegué a este cuento del cual Baba Yaga es un personaje importante. Creo que el cuento apareció compilado por primera vez en el libro Russian Fairy Tails, una compilación de cuentos rusos realizada por Alexander Afanasyev. Es una historia muy buena, un cuento de hadas, una especie de cenicienta rusa. Fiel a varios estereotipos, encontramos en este cuento a la protagonista bella, virtuosa, querida, y también a la madrastra y hermanastras perversas. A la maldad de éstas sumemos el horror del bosque y sus personajes siniestros, principalmente originado en la bruja Baba Yaga. La atmósfera del cuento en cierto punto se inunda de las corrientes frías y aterradoras tan típicas de muchos cuentos  infantiles… corrientes del terror que con frecuencia me han hecho pensar que esos cuentos infantiles de infantiles tienen poco. Además de estos terrores, en varios pasajes se nota que Afanasyev no ha olvidado al lector adulto al momento de presentar la historia: el cuento incorpora metáforas complejas, descripciones rurales, esbozos agudos del tema premio-castigo.

Hay una parte del relato que quiero destacar, parte de una charla entre Vasilisa y Baba Yaga:

“I spoke not,” Vasilissa answered, “because I dared not. But if thou wilt allow me, grandmother, I wish to ask thee some questions.”

“Well,” said the old witch, “only remember that every question does not lead to good. If thou knowest overmuch, thou wilt grow old too soon. What wilt thou ask?”

Relación interesante entre knowing y growing old. Porque conocimiento significa poder, pero también antigüedad. Juventud, poder, sabiduría; tesoros no necesariamente compatibles.